


eden

by agonies (Hyb)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Hunting, Isolation, M/M, Nature, Slow Build, Supernatural Elements, This is a love story, character death off-screen, disquieting energies, non-graphic harm to animals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2020-11-26 22:48:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20938016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: This part of the summer, their month in the mountains, with Jihoon all to himself. There's nothing Mingyu loves more.





	eden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [minhyukwithagun (deadlylampshades)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlylampshades/gifts).

> Song: Be

The day he met Jihoon they never made it to the sea. This is how he knows he’s dreaming, when the waves lap around his ankles. He knows he’s dreaming when Jihoon takes him to Busan and shows him all the places he was happy once, when he was a child and didn’t know to be afraid.

It’s late morning when Mingyu wakes, but this doesn’t surprise him. He inhales deep, squinting against the light that filters through the curtains and stretching his arms above his head. His throat is dry and his skin feels tacky, so Jihoon probably let him cling in his sleep last night despite the sweat.

There’s a glass of water on the nightstand and the bed beside him is empty. He hears birds outside and some faint rustling of life from the kitchen.

“You should’ve woken me up,” he mumbles from the door, scratching his neck, tongue still thick in his mouth. Jihoon jumps in his skin, just a twitch, though he would’ve thought the old creaking floor gave him away. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t even look up from the sizzling pan on the stove, but they both know Mingyu didn’t mean it anyway.

“Figured you needed the rest even if your fever broke,” Jihoon says. Quiet, but there’s no traffic out here and so Mingyu can hear him like they’re kissing close. Which would be nice. “How are you feeling?”

“Good.” He cozies up behind Jihoon, rubbing his hip bones through his sweats. Like this, Mingyu’s groin lines up with the warmth of his back, the inviting dip of his spine through his sweatshirt. “Better.” He has a weakness for the muscles here, likes feeling them bunch and flex under his hands when Jihoon is inside him. 

Jihoon isn’t taking any of his hints, covering one of Mingyu’s hands with his own as he turns over the eggs. They look a bit dry, bless him. “Eat,” he says, draping the eggs over a bowl of rice dolloped in sauce, adding a sprinkle of green onion from the cutting board. This is what he says, but he reaches up to reel Mingyu down by his shoulder, heedless of his stale morning breath, and the kiss is so warm and deep and lingering that Mingyu forgets all about his breakfast. He even drags Jihoon’s hands down from his waist inside his pajamas, where they curl cool and wonderful over the skin of his hips still blood hot from bed.

Still Jihoon steers him away and watches him eat, hip propped against the counter and arms crossed in the way that just means he’s comfortable, for Jihoon. If this were any other month of the year, any other day, Jihoon would be at the office already. Mingyu would be home alone, in his studio maybe, or at the market picking up fresh meat and vegetables for their dinner. His favorite vendors tell him he’s a perfect boyfriend, that his mother should be proud.

This month, every August, Mingyu can be patient. Up here in the mountains Jihoon doesn’t check his phone for calls from the firm, he doesn’t bring contracts to the dinner table, and he doesn’t rush out in the morning before Mingyu can kiss him goodbye. Up here, the city can’t swallow him like a crashing wave.

Unbidden, Jihoon comes closer and leans behind Mingyu’s chair to rub his neck, finding his seams and pressing them into malleability. He has strong hands, for a lawyer, but he’s always careful with Mingyu like this, has been ever since they met. _You don’t have to be, _Mingyu had laughed into his mouth once, what feels like a lifetime ago. And Jihoon said _but_ _you like it sweet, don’t you _and later, against Mingyu’s hair, _I won’t hurt you unless you ask me._

Maybe he groans a little too deep, too needful for the morning, slumping as Jihoon works the knots from above his shoulder blades, because Jihoon ruffles his hair and then he’s gone again.

“I packed some of your books while you were out of it,” Jihoon says, ignoring Mingyu’s outraged pout with the ease of long practice. “Let me make you some coffee and you can go read on the porch. Take it easy today, okay?”

Mingyu props his chin in one hand. “Baby, I must be a genius, because I can think of so many reasons to stay in bed.” Jihoon slants him an amused glance over one shoulder as he flicks on the electric kettle. The new cabinets he had installed are a little too tall for him and still too short for Mingyu all at once. He likes that, the middle ground. Awkward like first kisses and most every other genuine thing.

“Rest today and you can show me every single one,” Jihoon promises.

The sun is already high, hot gold over the treetops where the morning mist has burned away, but the shade is cool on Mingyu’s face under the eaves.

This is their fifth summer on the mountain, away from the city. Each winter the days wane brief and dim and Mingyu thinks he’s remembered it too perfectly to be real, the colors too vivid, until he comes back again. The first time, maybe, he was so nervous and eager to have Jihoon to himself that he would have gotten sentimental most anywhere. But there’s something special about the cottage, more than the sum of Mingyu’s attachments, more even than the way a warm breeze feels like sense memory, a thousand impressions of Jihoon’s lips against his cheek, his throat, his shoulder.

When Jihoon told him there was a little place out east, Mingyu pictured something cramped and cobwebbed with disuse. Not this postcard confection with its soaring tiled roof and latticed hardwood that glows like living skin. The porch faces a narrow lawn leveled from the slope of the mountainside, edged in weathered stones, and the steps lead down to terraces housing plots of tall ripe corn and cabbages, though Mingyu can’t see the latter from his padded bench.

The cottage belonged to Jihoon’s relatives, and he inherited it young. Mingyu wonders sometimes about the people who lived here before. He wonders who planted apple and pear and peach trees among all this wild and kept the deer at bay so the boughs could hang heavy with fruit all these years later.

Ms. Song, their nearest neighbor, she would know. Her house is half a mile down the slope but she acts as custodian for the cottage, tends the garden and the trees for her table, and most every year she and Jihoon undertake an elaborate, stubborn dance in which he tries to pay her more for her time and she falls into dialect and pretends not to understand. She also lives with her cousin who isn’t really her cousin, a woman who looks nothing like her. Whenever they cross paths in the forest Mingyu feels the same surge of wordless kinship. 

_ No one can see us here but the sky, _he thinks, and imagines that she understands.

His coffee cup is empty and his book hangs lax in one hand, thoughts floating on the horizon with the stirring of wind through leaves, when he notices Jihoon leaning in the open doorway behind him. They watch the chickens peck across the yard, honeybees that might be from Ms. Song’s hives bobbing drowsily among the flowers.

“The view’s better than my book,” Mingyu says at last. A little too rushed, all in one breath, too eager for the quirk of Jihoon’s grin at his haste. “Couldn’t really appreciate it last night.”

“You were pretty loopy,” Jihoon agrees. He folds a knee under himself and tucks up against Mingyu’s side, right where he wants him. “You’re looking better already. The air up here always agrees with you.”

Mingyu engulfs Jihoon’s knee in one hand and strokes the jut of bone beneath his thumb. Better still, Jihoon indulges him and leans up to kiss his throat, hanging some unseen constellation there while Mingyu fights not to shut his eyes against the sunlight. This bit is always a shock, sweet and shivering. Touching Jihoon out in the open air, not a sliver of polite distance left.

_ I don’t like it, _ Hao had said, sullen, back when Mingyu was moving into Jihoon’s apartment with its tall windows and view of the river. _ A guy like that is never going to put you first. _

_ I wish I could tell you how he looks at me, _he said, and that had been enough. They both knew that Minghao had never looked at him like that, not even when they were together. Not the way he looks at Jun.

Jihoon keeps on working over his neck, his jaw, his collarbones, slow and indulgent, and every time he presses a lush little kiss to Mingyu’s mouth he can’t help but part his lips and whine in hopes of the glide of his tongue licking him open.

“You should rest.” Jihoon’s eyes are so black in the shade. There’s heat in his face, his lips flushed dark, and Mingyu never gets tired of seeing him like this. The first time he ever brought Mingyu to his place, not a hotel, he kept pushing him over the edge until he came dry, keening with it. Jihoon had stared down at him like he could pull him apart at the joints and eat him raw, and Mingyu would let him. 

“Fuck rest,” he sighs, with feeling, and bears Jihoon back against the cushions to ruck up his shirt and bury his face in his chest. Jihoon has been at the office too much, even more than usual, and Mingyu’s selfishly pleased to see that he’s lost none of his density from poor eating. God, has it really been months since they had time for more than rushed handjobs and Jihoon kissing his ear and telling him to go back to sleep. He’s starved for this, goes mindless a while kissing and biting and sucking until Jihoon’s skin is reddened and he’s hard against Mingyu’s hip. Wet gasps escape above Mingyu’s head and the heavy summer air quakes.

“Sit up,” Jihoon pants, and Mingyu’s body obeys before he even understands the words. “Let me see you.” 

“You know what I look like,” Mingyu complains, feels the perspiration at his temples and the pulse of his cock distending his sweats. 

“Beautiful.” Jihoon says it with such low unstudied conviction that it hits harder than a tease, because he’s not trying to fluster him with the praise. 

There’s nothing unstudied in his hand on Mingyu’s cock, twisting slow and easy inside his sweatpants so the spit he gathered in his palm doesn’t dry out in the open air. He’s so intent that Mingyu thinks, all in a tender rush, that this year has been just as tough on him. It reads like a code, the way he kisses Mingyu at his pulse and through his shirt, like he’s sending _ miss you, miss you, miss you. _

A hawk plummets down into the trees and Mingyu’s stomach turns over with the nearness of his orgasm, sunbursts blooming behind his eyelids when he can’t help but squeeze them shut. His thighs are trembling and Jihoon is curved so tightly into his side, like they were carved to fit together, one knee braced over Mingyu’s and one hand tangled in his hair.

He tells him to let go and Mingyu does, all in one shuddering sigh, the sunlight and the heat and the living sound all pouring inside him until he feels too large for his skin, his head falling back heavy in Jihoon’s grasp. Still he clings on to the last unraveling thread of coherency and catches Jihoon by the wrist, dragging him close to lick his fingers and then his palm clean in flat broad strokes like a cat.

Before he can swallow, Jihoon kisses him, and Mingyu knows he’ll never find the words later for how holy it feels.

“You should have chicken soup tonight.” Jihoon pets his mussed hair for a moment more before rolling up to his feet. He’s going to go kill a chicken, he means, but he’ll do it in the shed out back where Mingyu doesn’t have to see, and he’ll bring it to him cleaned.

After supper Mingyu is more than ready to sleep again, sprawled across the bed, and he doesn’t stir until the mattress dips under Jihoon’s weight. A hand strokes his hair, then glides nonsense patterns over his shoulders. Another code, he thinks in his fog.

“Go back to sleep, puppy.” He grins when Mingyu twists his head to nip at his forearm. 

“Not sleeping,” Mingyu lies, muffled by the pillow. He rolls onto his side and tucks one folded arm beneath his cheek. 

“Something on your mind?” He sounds curious, expectant. Jihoon isn’t great with feelings in the tangled abstract, with moods and irrational urges, but he’s good at making plans. Take more vitamins, see the doctor, get some fresh air, come to the gym, break the problem down to its component pieces until it all makes sense. Once Mingyu called him his general and Jihoon missed the compliment entirely, busy frowning over how he would never want to be responsible for other people’s lives like that. Mingyu didn’t tell him that was an unfortunate stance for a man hellbent on a political career.

There _ is _ something on Mingyu’s mind, as it happens, but his tongue fails him at the last moment.

“I didn’t see your guitar,” he complains instead. He shuffles on his elbows until he’s lying back between Jihoon’s thighs where he sits up against the wall, head pillowed on his stomach. “You didn’t bring it?”

“Had my hands full with you,” he chuckles, and Mingyu feels the vibration of it from his belly. “Needed room for the bow, anyway.”

Mingyu cranes his head back so he can see his face, not quite comprehending. “Are you hunting again? I thought you didn’t like it.” 

“There are things I enjoy more,” Jihoon agrees with a twist of his mouth. Lightly, his fingers trace up the column of Mingyu’s arched throat. “But Ms. Song said there are too many deer, and she would know. Thought I might be able to help.”

“I can probably cook it better than last time.” He doesn’t sound too certain to his own ears. That was two summers ago, and the meat was gamey and strange, tough to swallow. He read up on it, after, and he thinks soaking the cuts in milk for twenty-four hours would do the trick, assuming Ms. Song has some to spare from her goats. That isn’t what settles uneasily in his gut now. He remembers how pale Jihoon was, after. The way his eyes were too wide when he came from the shed, like butchering a chicken and a deer weren’t alike at all.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” 

It’s steady and mild, coaxing, but still Mingyu’s mouth goes dry. He turns to rub his face into the crease of Jihoon’s thigh. He smells fresh, like he’s been out in the grass. 

“I was thinking about Chuseok,” he lies.

Jihoon is very still. Finally, his fingers card through the short hairs at Mingyu’s nape and cup his skull. “Is that all?”

“You could come back home with me,” Mingyu presses. “Minhee’s going to bring her boyfriend again, too.” Limbs still heavy and uncoordinated, he lumbers up to sit across Jihoon’s thighs. The late light from the window is kind to the curve of Jihoon’s cheek but his eyes are impossible to read.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jihoon says. His jaw is tightening up as if by some unseen screw turning. “You know it’s not the same.”

“Everybody likes you,” Mingyu cajoles, because it’s true, his sisters are all fondly jealous of what he has, but Jihoon doesn’t smile back. “And I don’t like leaving you home all alone.” 

“With all due respect, your father does _ not _ like me.” This is how Jihoon draws a fence around himself, formality bristling like barbed wire. 

“That’s not true.” Privately, Mingyu is less certain. His parents don’t really believe he happens to have some well-off lawyer for a roommate, that’s for sure. _ How much older is that friend of yours, _ his mom always asks, and then repeats _ seven years _back to herself like she’s turning over a stone, troubled. Mingyu is twenty-six now and he wants to ask her sometimes what seven years matter, compared to the rest of his life.

“He thinks I make you less of a man,” Jihoon bites back, so hard and unkind that it knocks the air from Mingyu’s lungs. He must gape, taken aback by the sting, because Jihoon sits up and holds him fast by his hips. “I took his only son into my house and I treat him like my wife, that’s what your father thinks.”

“So don’t come, then.” Mingyu finds his footing with a dizzy sway. “I forgot to soak the beans for tomorrow,” he adds, mumbled, and by the time he’s finished fuming silently in the kitchen, Jihoon has turned out the lights and rolled himself to face the wall.

In a hazy grey hour he hiccups a pained sound in his sleep. Before Mingyu can think if he should wake him, he’s quiet again, curled in on himself like a grenade.

The chill doesn’t last through breakfast. Despite all that open air, somehow there’s no space up here for misunderstandings to lay down roots. Jihoon always stumbles over apologies but he kisses in earnest and lets Mingyu bury his face in his chest and breathe. Then a bird flies into the window, startling them both, and the tension evaporates. When he searches outside Mingyu can’t find a body, no more evidence than a few downy feathers among the clover, so maybe it didn’t hurt itself after all. 

When he’s packing up his sketchbook and supplies, he has a flash of panic over his storefront, but of course Jihoon would have already disabled the site ahead of their trip when Mingyu was sick. He’s careful like that, good with details. He already mentioned that he left Mingyu’s phone with Soonyoung, with instructions to take it back to the store in case it could be fixed after Mingyu dropped it in the toilet while he was heaving.

At the edge of the cottage’s clearing he passes under the fruit trees and snares a few heavy round pears from the boughs, tucking them into his bag. Higher up the slope, near a tiny bubbling spring in the rock that he found their second summer, he sits and eats them slice by slice with his penknife. Slowly, in the quiet, the animals startled by his approach reemerge. 

For this he wore his glasses, though his vision is clear enough that most days he doesn’t bother when he’ll just be slouching over his drafting table. Today he wants every edge crisp and certain as he sketches a fat bumblebee perched on clover, paying special attention to the segments of its body and the placement of its translucent wings. The squirrels are harder, darting away as soon as he can articulate a clear line from head to tail. It doesn’t help that his markers are drying out, he thinks, capping another in frustration.

Once he settles with a pile of oak leaves and his favorite pencils, he’s soothed. He read up on the different species, and he thinks he can tell which is which from memory now. He draws each leaf to scale, finds himself hunching forward as his glasses slip down his nose. The negative space is what makes it, the close sawtooth edge of one variety distinct from the swooping points of another, but he takes his time with the interior as well, placing each vein just as he sees it, no stylistic flourishes to distract. Fussy work, his neck aching by the time he’s finished experimenting in shading with his soft pencils, but he’s pleased with the results.

He could do this with his tablet, he thinks, satisfied. He wouldn’t be bored. Not like this, searching for all the hidden joining places that make a thing alive.

Jihoon isn’t back yet, the cottage silent with long cool shadows, no stirring of his arrival as Mingyu showers and runs a bath.

Splayed naked across the bed, curtains thrown wide so that gold sunlight covers him like a blanket, he waits so long that his quickened pulse slows and he drowses a spell. Blinking himself awake, he rises up onto his forearms with a jaw-cracking yawn. When he was opening himself up in the bath he’d gotten hard for just a few eager strokes but he’s softened again and he just feels slick and open and impatient.

Counting the days since Jihoon fucked him last would be pathetic, but that’s never stopped him before. Last April, that’s how long it’s been since he left him with carpet burn on his knees and lovebites up his shoulders that ached sweetly when Mingyu touched them, craning his neck to see in the mirror. That was just before the firm took Jihoon to the coast for a week over some hotel merger, Mingyu already forgets the names. Other junior partners brought their wives and girlfriends, he knows that.

He pulls on his jeans from the floor, and after a moment’s consideration, the shirt that Jihoon slept in from the top of the hamper. It’s really Mingyu’s shirt, black with a Basquiat drawing on the back, but Jihoon stole it years ago. It’s worn thin and soft to the touch and he breathes in the smell of Jihoon’s skin when he tugs it over his head. Once, in the beginning, Jihoon picked it up where Mingyu had tossed it away the night before and he wore it to breakfast, tucked into his jeans. Like he knew how it made a vise of Mingyu’s throat, how his eyes stung and he blamed it on the late morning glare.

This is what he reminds himself, when Jihoon is working late again and can’t meet him for dinner. When Mingyu turns up alone and endures Hao’s disapproving glare. Jihoon has never been casual with him. Minghao might have been bold enough to hold his hand in the street, his eyes all defiant shine, but Jihoon has always tried to make him feel _ important. _He tries.

He doesn’t find Jihoon on the porch, or in the garden. The shed is locked from the outside. A sliver of ice seems to settle in his chest, though there’s no reason for the disquiet. Sometimes when Jihoon is very late his imagination will run away from him, spinning a wordless panic over trains running off the tracks or muggings with sharp knives. Mingyu knows better than to admit to these fears, the way his stomach drops when he calls Jihoon and listens to the phone ring for what feels like an eternity. It would be thoughtless of him to mention it, after everything Jihoon has been through.

So he takes a deep breath, and another, willing his heartbeat to slow. He watches himself like an actor on stage and takes his body through the motions of nonchalance. An unhurried gait, surveying the shady places where their little clearing and its fruit trees meet the wilder forest. He even plucks down a pair of peaches to share with Jihoon, cradling them carefully in his splayed fingers so they won’t bruise.

Of course Jihoon isn’t far. Sitting on a blanket, caught half between sun and shade, one of his journals unopened across his lap. He’s staring into nothing, doesn’t seem to hear Mingyu approaching from his periphery, and his voice catches in his throat before he can call out.

Jihoon’s face is wet. 

His knees smart with how suddenly he hits the ground beside him. “Baby,” he beckons, breathless with dismay. This only seems to make it worse, a fresh sob hitching Jihoon’s chest as he slumps into Mingyu’s shoulder. 

He’s never seen Jihoon cry before. Not once. 

“Talk to me.” As tight as he’s clutching Jihoon, he can feel his ragged breaths steady. When he pulls away he leaves a wet patch in Mingyu’s shirt, sticking to his skin, and it’s warm just for a moment. “Is this about last night? I know it’s not easy talking about family, I’m so sorry—”

“No,” Jihoon interrupts, voice still thick, and it sets him to coughing as Mingyu anxiously rubs his spine through his shirt. “You shouldn’t be sorry, fuck. It’s all my fault.”

Mingyu laces their fingers together, squeezing once for reassurance. “Have you been thinking about this all day? I wish you’d said something, you scared me.”

“Your family is important to you.” Jihoon sounds steadier now, only the edge of his voice heavy with guilt. “That’s such a stupid thing to say, of course they’re important. I don’t care if your parents never like me, they love _ you. _”

“I care,” Mingyu says quietly. Something in his chest twists at the admission. “If you were a woman they’d treat you like family. I’d do anything to give you that.”

Jihoon tugs at their joined hands and kisses Mingyu’s knuckles. Firm, defiant, like a brand. “You’re my family.”

In the quiet he forces Jihoon to take a peach, and he eats the other beside him. They’re not badly bruised despite how Mingyu dropped them. He worries that Jihoon is winding himself up to a speech, something heavy and self-recriminating, but he just wants to see him smile again and his mouth runs away from him.

“You know what I was thinking,” he begins, jostling Jihoon with one elbow. Usually he’s steady as a tree stump but he sways in place now. “I was thinking maybe next year. Or this fall, maybe? Maybe Soonyoung and Seokmin could come out here for a while. Or we could rent something closer to the city, the four of us.” This is a terrible lie, of course. He never wants to see Soonyoung, but it would make Jihoon happy and so he can be generous.

Only Jihoon doesn’t look happy. He scrubs at his reddened eyes and sighs. It’s terrible that he should be so beautiful in this light, still, the perfect secret curve where his eye meets his cheek, his hair shining like glass in the sun.

“I thought I told you,” he frowns. “He and Seokmin broke up.”

The sound in Mingyu’s ears goes funny and squeezed. That’s his heartbeat, he thinks, crowding out the insects and the birds and the breeze. “No. You didn’t tell me.”

Jihoon flicks the pit of his peach away into the grass. “Thought I did.”

“Did it just happen?

A slow blink, like Jihoon has caught the color of something dangerous in his tone. “A few months ago.”

“Oh,” Mingyu sighs, more involuntary breath than a word. Like he’s been struck. 

Soonyoung is Jihoon’s best friend. Soonyoung was there for him when he lost his parents. Soonyoung is in love with Jihoon.

And Mingyu could live with that knowledge, when he was with Seokmin. 

“I need to say something,” Jihoon says, and his whole face pinches tight. 

Thoughts fall together faster than words, a blazing moment of connection. All the nights working late. Soonyoung’s quick, searching eyes. In that searing clarity Mingyu is ashamed of himself to find he’s already forgiven Jihoon without hesitation, without a flicker of self-respect. He forgives him, and he hates him, and he thinks _ you can tell me you’re sorry, but don’t you dare think you can leave. _

“I’m listening,” he pulls up from his chest, toneless and deep. He imagines breaking Soonyoung’s fingers one by one. The rage is a reflex, he thinks, as if observing himself from a great distance. If he stops being angry he’ll just hurt, he’ll be gutted, he’ll sound pathetic when he asks _ when did I stop being enough for you? _

“I said things all wrong last night. I always say things wrong.” Jihoon is pulling up fistfuls of grass and catches himself at it. He looks Mingyu in the eye instead. His face is still blotchy with crying. “And I take it for granted that you’ll put up with me and I can make it right later.”

Jihoon rubs his thumb down the spine of the journal, then flattens his palm over the cover. “It feels like I’ve always been married to you in my mind,” he says. Slow and careful, like an equation he’s struggling with, like he hasn’t reached inside Mingyu’s chest and made a fist. “But I never asked you if you wanted to be my husband. You’re supposed to ask.”

The first boy Mingyu ever kissed elbowed him so hard he bit through his own lip. He tasted the blood for days, blood and chlorine from the swimming pool, and maybe he tasted it for years after that, too. It feels impossible that he could begin there and run a single thread through his life to Jihoon here with his red eyes and the marks of Mingyu’s teeth up his neck, his open palm like a statue, like he’s holding forever and waiting for Mingyu to take it.

Too clumsy, too eager, the blanket is twisted up under them when he rolls them into the grass and Jihoon permits this. If he cries again, well Mingyu is crying louder, gulping for air and catching Jihoon with the flats of his teeth when he grins, again and again, until his face aches but he can’t stop. He can’t stop babbling and he doubts a word of it makes sense, not the good solid sense of Jihoon pressing a knee up between his legs, the realness of the crushed green smell beneath them and the dirt cool from the shade. 

“Did I say yes?” he mumbles into Jihoon’s throat. Bites down again, animal, and Jihoon is just as rough scraping his short nails over Mingyu’s nape, fresh welts stinging under sunlight. 

“You did.” He pushes up onto his knees, his spine straight. Unthinking, Mingyu flattens himself onto his belly. Jihoon’s breath is a knife through the air. “You should be resting.”

“Do I look tired to you? Stop moving, baby, I’m just getting you wet.” Mingyu shoves his pants down enough to get his mouth on him, licking long wet stripes as drool coats his knuckles. “Don’t come,” he warns, tightening one hand slick with his own spit, because Jihoon is so hard already, leaking bitter across his tongue. “I was waiting for you, you know that? I’d be ready for you every day if you asked me, just come home and show me you’re mine.”

“We can’t—” Jihoon chokes, his knuckles whitening on Mingyu’s shoulder, the dig of his fingertips into the muscle so good that Mingyu’s dick throbs against the ground. 

“I’m asking,” he goads as he peels out of his shirt. “Come on. Fuck me like you’re my husband.”

There’s pale sunlight and shade across his face, so much noise around them, buzzing insects and calling birds and the grass under his shoulders when the blanket is rucked askew beneath his hips. Jihoon is naked as the first man and his shoulders could carry the world, broad enough to hoist Mingyu’s knees when he folds him in half and sinks in so slow, shuddering when he breaches him and meets the glide of slick.

It doesn’t hurt as much as it should, probably, dizzy chemicals flooding Mingyu until he floats. He lets himself feel it, chase the aches and the sweetest angle, arch up and whine deep in his chest because he knows what the sound does to Jihoon. He wants that dark look across Jihoon’s face with the sky burning blue behind him. Wants this moment of being forced open after so long, pinned to the earth like bricks sit on his chest. He wants Jihoon to hold him. 

Mingyu comes first, into his hand, and goes lax and open as Jihoon rocks into him. Harder, when Mingyu demands it, when he hooks one leg around his waist and drags him deeper. The slap of skin sounds like it could echo for miles. 

“You’re my husband,” Mingyu says, a little stupidly, when Jihoon sags against him in the aftershocks. They kiss so long the breeze carries away the sweat from their skin and they shiver.

“Let’s go,” Jihoon murmurs into his shoulder after a spell catching their breath. He eases Mingyu into his jeans where he lies on his back and rubs his face into his belly before passing him his shirt. “It’ll be dark soon.” 

The sun is far from the horizon but Mingyu follows without contradiction, feeling his heartbeat where their tangled fingers meet as they amble down the trail. 

Normally Jihoon isn’t one to dream, doesn’t kick and flail in his sleep like Mingyu. And he’s very still, his voice bottled tight in his chest, until Mingyu blinks the bleariness from his eyes in the dark and gently shakes him awake. He kisses Mingyu into the mattress, after that, cupping his jaw, and Mingyu forgets to ask him what he dreamed.

**Author's Note:**

> ~ 
> 
> Additional notes: Jihoon (and to a lesser extent, Mingyu) are not fully out in various aspects of their lives, whether professionally or among family. Internalized homophobia isn't really a theme, but the complications of a semi-private relationship do play a role. Please heed all tags and warnings for MCD and supernatural elements. This isn't a theme I take lightly, at all, but I hope you'll find the story as sincere as intended.
> 
> This fic is, above all, made possible by the boundless support and creativity of my junior demon. Wouldn't have found my Woozi without you, adore you always <3
> 
> > [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/188OQlnuRHSTYljegVyedr?si=1Wl803f3RAepHpna5TZtlw)  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
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